(Courtesy Edith Farnsworth House) The Last of Animal Builders If you can’t make it to Boston, try to catch the show at its future stops in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. No matter: Her brilliant bronze and porcelain works-monumental but also mournful, splendidly crafted yet tinged with despair-stand on their own.
Perhaps because Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museum building is less ripe for appropriation, Leigh avoided architectural statements here. The sculptures she exhibited are now featured in a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Leigh’s Gold Lion–winning intervention reveled in an “over-the-top Blackness,” as she described it. She concealed the boastful cornice under a bushy thatched roof, superimposed rustic wooden pilotis over all that redbrick, and installed a large bronze resembling a West African ritual mask in the forecourt.
At last year’s art biennale, artist Simone Leigh called attention to this fact by proposing an outfit change of her own. The United States Pavilion at Venice’s Giardini della Biennale is a utilitarian building in Palladian-which is to say, Jeffersonian-drag. (Photo by Timothy Schenck © Simone Leigh) Simone Leigh
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